2.5 stars
First Sentence: The winter of the year my father carried a gun for his own protection was the coldest on record in Chicago.
Thoughts: Have I complained about books ending badly lately? I don’t think I have. Most of my recent reads have ended either well or acceptably and the ones that didn’t I dnf’d as soon as they got on my nerves. This one, though…
An Unfinished Season is the story of about nine months in the life of Wilson Ravan, specifically his nineteenth year. He was a senior in high school at the beginning of the year and a freshman in college by the end of it. “But that’s a year off,” you say. Yes, he had to retake eighth grade because he was sick with a polio-like illness for most of the year.
Wilson’s father is Teddy Ravan. He owned a stationery factory in Chicago. Recently there have been union rumblings around the city which resulted in Teddy’s workers going on strike. Teddy is a staunch 1950s Republican and will not put up with this strike nonsense. Then someone started making threatening phone calls to Mrs. Ravan. Strange cars started following Teddy on his way home from work. So Teddy got his local sheriff (and also friend) to escort him home at night. The sheriff also gave Teddy the gun from the first sentence. Unlike Chekhov’s gun, it is never fired, not even when someone throws a brick through the Ravan’s window one night. Why? Teddy and the sheriff figure out who the mastermind behind the threats was and took care of the problem. The strike ended shortly after.
Then Wilson’s grandfather in New York got sick, so his mother went back east to take care of him. This turned into an ersatz separation between her and Teddy as Mrs. Ravan (whose first name I don’t think was ever mentioned) fell under the influence of her wealthy family. She returned to Chicago after her father died, though, although she had changed. She brought back her family’s Chinese maid who helped her redecorate the house according to the principals of Feng Shui.
Wilson wasn’t too happy about the redecorating, but by then he had graduated high school and was working his summer job as a copyboy at a local small newspaper. He used the job mainly to get stories to entertain debutantes with at the balls he went to every weekend. Networking with the People Worth Knowing, yanno. The parties are where Wilson’s life took a strange turn.
He met a young lady named Aurora at one of the balls. He had noticed her father among the parents along the walls at other balls because Jack (her father) was always silent and never mingled. The reason why was because Jack was a psychologist and amused himself by privately analyzing everyone he passed.
Aurora and Wilson began dating each other over the summer. Wilson found out that the reason why Jack was so odd was because he had been in the Pacific theater during WWII. One evening when he and Aurora explored Jack’s study, Wilson found some pictures and realized that Jack had been in the Philippines and had been on the Bataan Death March.
Then tragedy struck, ending Aurora and Jack’s budding romance. It took Wilson thirty years to find out why Aurora cut him off and when he did it was completely anticlimactic.
Another thing that bothered me about the epilogue where Wilson “got the answers” was the fact that he became a negotiator for the U.N. He didn’t strike me as the type. Corporate lawyer, yes, but not a negotiator.
But the biggest thing that bothered me about the book was Just’s allergy to quotation marks. Once again we get a book full of dead text with nothing setting off the dialogue to make the characters seem alive. People! Serious Literature is not and should not be lifeless words on a page!
The Eclectic Reviewer 